“The arid interior of east-central Brazil. Northern Bahia province, mostly.”

“The species is no more? They are an ex-species?”

I caught Ryan’s Monty Python reference. Rachel did not.

“The last surviving wild Spix’s disappeared in October of 2000,” she said.

“That’s a known fact?” I asked.

She nodded. “That bird’s story is very poignant. Would you like to hear it?”

Ryan was getting that look.

My eyes crimped in warning.

Ryan’s lips pressed together.

“Very much,” I said.

“Recognizing the Spix’s macaw’s perilous status, in 1985 Birdlife International decided to census the species in its only known habitat.”

“In Brazil.”

“Yes. Depressingly, the total count came to five.”

“That’s not good,” I said.

“No. And the situation went downhil from there. By the end of the decade the number of sightings had fal en to zero. In 1990, Tony Juniper, one of the world’s top parrot experts, went to Brazil to determine whether the Spix’s truly was extinct in the wild. After six weeks of scouring Bahia by four-wheel drive, questioning every farmer, schoolboy, padre, and poacher he met, Juniper located a single male living in a cactus on a riverbank near the town of Curaça.”

“Where’s that?” Ryan asked, flipping through the macaws.

“About thirteen hundred miles north of Rio.” With a tight smile, Rachel retrieved and closed her book.

I did some quick math. “The Spix’s lived on by itself for ten years after the initial sighting?”

“That bird became an international cause célèbre. For a decade, teams of scientists and an entire Brazilian vil age recorded its every move.”

“Poor guy.” Ryan.

“And they didn’t just watch,” Rachel said. “The situation turned into an ornithological soap opera. Believing the Spix’s genes were too precious to waste, conservationists decided the male needed a mate. But macaws bond for life and this little guy already had a spouse, a bright green Il iger’s macaw.”

“Birdie miscegenation.” Ryan.

“Sort of.” Rachel answered Ryan, then gave me a puzzled look. “Though the couple never cohabitated. The Spix’s lived on a facheiro cactus, the Il iger’s in a hol ow tree trunk. They’d fly together during the day, then at sundown the male Spix’s would drop the female Il iger’s off at her tree and return to his cactus.”

“Sometimes a man needs a place of his own.” Ryan.

Two vertical lines puckered Rachel’s brow, but she continued.

“In 1995 researchers released a female Spix’s into the male’s territory, hoping the two would bond and reproduce.”

“Uh-oh. The proverbial other woman.”

Rachel ignored that.

“The female Spix’s courted the male, and he responded.”

“Divorce court?”

“The three birds flew together for a month.”

“Ménage à trois.”

“Is he always like this?” Rachel asked me.

“Yes. Then what happened?”